Young Africans learning leadership, business skills at USD

Shade Ladipo hopes she can get women into businesses in her native country of Nigeria. Sosthene Ouedraogoto hopes to improve the court and medical systems in his country, Burkina Faso.

Both are learning skills to help with those goals as part of an international program this summer at the University of San Diego, hosted by the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the Kroc School.

“This has really challenged my views about leadership, about what I’m doing,” said Ladipo, 34.

She and 24 others in the program are taking classes and participating in events designed to boost training for people who’ve founded private organizations or businesses aimed at promoting the health and well-being of people in their countries.

The young Africans arrived at USD on June 16 and are staying until July 30, when they will fly to Washington, D.C., to join others who make up the 1,000 participants in this year’s Mandela Washington Fellowship, which began in 2014 as the flagship program of the Young African Leaders Initiative.

USD is one of 38 different universities across the country participating this year and is the only Southern California host. The USD fellows are focusing specifically on business and entrepreneurship, while fellows at other universities are studying civic leadership or public management focused on renewable energy.

President Barack Obama launched the initiative in 2010 to support young African leaders ages 25-35 working to help their countries prosper and strengthen democracy, peace and security across Sub-Saharan Africa.

While in San Diego, the fellows participated in San Diego Startup Week in June, and toward the end of the six weeks they will have opportunities to develop prototypes in San Diego’s Design Lab at UC San Diego and participate in USD’s Mandela Social Innovation Challenge.

Ouedraogo, 34, is an attorney in Burkina Faso, a country with a population of 18 million. Only 25 percent of those residents know that the legal profession even exists, he said.

“We have laws and institutions, but they’re not strong,” Ouedraogo said about Burkina Faso, which gained independence in 1960. “There’s not what we call a legal culture. People are used to settling matters passionately, by fighting.”

He launched the Center for Law Quality and Justice in 2013 to promote economic and social justice and make the law more inclusive and accessible.

Besides problems with justice in his country, Ouedraogo said hospitals are crowded and understaffed. Just a week before he left for San Diego, three doctors were stabbed at a hospital by a friend of a patient who had died, which led to a strike that shut down emergency services for a week.

Another stabbing at a hospital happened June 14 under similar circumstances, and a hospital was set on fire two years ago after a pregnant woman died while unattended.

“People are very angry against care providers,” Ouedraogo said. “When they’re angry, they don’t know where to go. They don’t know what action they can take, so they just try to settle it by themselves.”

When he returns to Africa, Ouedraogo said he wants to set up a hot line so people will be able to call attorneys to fight for them when they have claim to be victims of negligence or malpractice.

Ladipo, 34, is a media entrepreneur and director of WEConnect International in Nigeria, which connects women with business.

“We try to convince local companies why they should have more women in their supply chain,” she said. “We educate them and give them figures that show these are general practices that have been done globally.”

Ladipo said her organization has found that many Nigerian companies never grow because they don’t access the supply chain of larger companies.

As part of the fellowship program, she was eligible to apply for a startup grant, which prompted her to think of an idea to bring back to her country. Her proposal was about financial technology.

“I want to focus on helping women save and also teach them financial skills,” she said. “To help them invest and bridge the gap between women and money.”

Botswana native Zandile Rammekwa, 28 is one of the co-founders of Jam for Brunch, a leading lifestyle event in Gaborone.

Rammekwa said she is learning skills to help her business educate people about sustainable food and promote local music.

“With the food market, we want people to become more self-sustainable,” she said. “There’s taking care of what you eat, but also commercializing it.”

As an example, Rammekwa said Botswana encouraged people to grow tomatoes two years ago, but many went to waste because of the over-abundance. That could have been solved if people were taught to make ketchup or other things with them, she said.

She also hopes to create a compilation CD featuring musicians who play in the marketplace her business runs to show that people can make a living by playing music.